Africa is not a hopeless continent as Zimbabwe is not a hopeless country. Despite rising poverty and Aids pandemic there are individuals and communities developing agriculture methods that enable them to produce enough food for living and to earn extra incomes. Even if the land becomes more limited they succeed to produce more on less land just by applying different soil and water conservation methods more intensively. During our visit to Zimbabwe we noticed that it is very important who gives the solution to the problem of low fertility, overgrazing and erosion of the soil. The agricultureal or food production solutions worked out trough the discussing process between community members, chefs and ancestors spirits and result in environmental recovery, organic farming and self-sustainable communities. One of these communities is living in Chikukwa in the east of Zimbabwe. Solutions brought form British colonial successors or other organizations and individuals are mostly adopted for a certain time and than sooner or later rejected. Mostly the rejection happens because no solution from outside as conventional mono-cropping farming with hybrid seeds and expensive chemical inputs didn’t improve the lives of the natives or solved the problem of malnutrition and hunger. That’s the story of Brian Oldreive, a fanatic religious white commercial farmer, who firmly believes that God led him to establish the benefits of conservation tillage. He has the method and he is spreading his successful vision nationwide trough KingsWay Community Church he established. But he didn’t succeed.

An article includes the stories listed below:

Without a high-tech breakthrough, nor help of Western aid programmes but with mostly traditional farming methods and without chemical inputs the community of Chikukwa, a village in the east of Zimbabwe near a Mozambique border, succeeded to increase fertility, combat the erosion of soil caused by heavy rains and repeating floods, awakened dried water sources and quit with malnutrition. They adopted and developed permaculture - it means permanent agriculture - as a holistic purpose and a model of ecological balanced way of life. Permaculture is stimulating inventiveness, self-confidence and wilful solving of environmental problems. Visiting Chikukwa we realised that permaculture empowered the community by successfully integrating ecological, social and human elements of agriculture. By so doing it has demonstrated that there are real, sustainable alternatives to conventional farming. Local community in Chikukwa discovered it by its own over the past ten years. Over the years community members involved in permaculture are self-sustainable and they produce enough food on overpopulated slopes in uplands. Today about 700 households in Chikukwa are involved in permaculture. In 1991 they created their own Chikukwa Permaculture Centre without foreigner financial support. In the centre they are running regular trainings for Zimbabwean farmers led by over 40 trained women farmers from the community. They successfully combined traditional society structure, traditional believes and sustainable agriculture. They found a solution of their problems on their own within the community and they are developing and improving it trough several individual and group projects included in an article.

In Chikukwa everything started more than ten years ago when water springs dried up end mountain slopes were completely eroded. Few members of the community living on the chiefs’ hill gathered together in the Ulrich and Elizabeths’ hut /Germans living in Zimbabwe for 20 years, last 16 years in Chikukwa. They are living on communal land on the chiefs’ hill and they are equal members of the community/. They started to re-afforest the slopes and awakened the springs. The years followed are like an annotation of successful stories that changed the Chikukwa community in a kind of cohesive collective within witch discussing the problem and finding the solution collectively is the base of relationships.

Brian Oldreive firmly believes that God led him to establish the benefits of conservation tillage . His research into conservation tillage was prompted by his observation of the tremendous soil and water loss trough erosion of the fine-grained soil on Hinton Estate, near Bindura in the northeast of Zimbabwe, where he was a manager. In eighties he embarked on a quest to reduce tillage and increase soil surface residue cover. Under Brian’s leadership, crop yields at Hinton Estate have dramatically improved and stabilised the process of soil degradation has been reversed. Currently, Hinton Estate — the larger wheat producer in Zimbabwe — has a summer cropping programme of 1200 hectares, and up to 800 hectares is double-cropped with winter wheat. Hinton Estate is a member of the elite Ten Tonne Club, with zero-tillage maize yields in excess of ten tonnes following wheat, soya and cotton crops. These results have convincingly established that consistently high yields can be achieved from zero-tilled crops with the use of hybrid seed and chemical inputs.

Brian noticed the stark contrast between the relative prosperity of Hinton estate compared with the poverty of the neighbouring Chiweshe Communal Area. This led Brian to focus primarily on the plight of communal and small-scale farmers nationwide. He believes that conservation tillage is the solution in the effort to increase agricultureal production and to safeguard God-given resources. In nineties he established the KingsWay Community Church and a company named Agriway farming in Bindura spreading zero-tillage agricultureal method nationwide and running a Church’s commercial farm with 600 employees. Through the Church he is propagating his vision of the solution to the malnutrition, poverty and hunger. On the farm he is growing 240 hectares of wheat under irrigation and other crops, he has trial fields of hybrid maize seeds produced by the largest seed producer in Zimbabwe, the Seed-Co company, with the priest Piet Dreyer he is training and educating pastor teachers and farming trainers to become extension church’s stuff. Agriway is a company that is commercially grading seeds. From May to October women at Agriway inspected 324 tonnes of maize seed sold to Seed-Co. The profits belong to the Church he established and to the training centre.

In spite of his devotion and a deep commitment to sharing this knowledge with poor communal farmers, distributing seeds for free and preparing trial plots into communities he didn’t succeed. He has an interesting religious explanation for the reasons why he failure. Moreover he is white and he is bringing the solution from outside the community. Despite everything he is continuing his mission. He is convinced he needs to convert the natives. He is also on the list for land seizure and he can lose the Church’s farm. If things will go wrong, he will move with his family to Zambia and continue his mission. But he will come back to Zimbabwe, he said